ICE's war on its home

 London Review of Books- ICE – popularly known as ‘la migra’ – is an artefact of the so-called war on terror. Founded in 2003, it swiftly went about detaining and deporting thousands of Muslim, Arab and South Asian men, all labelled as national security threats after 9/11. Earlier this year, ICE was involved in the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University graduate student who was taken into custody as a result of his involvement in the Gaza solidarity protests and remains in an immigration detention centre in Louisiana. A green-card holder, Khalil is in the US legally, as are many of ICE’s recent targets. They include Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was arrested without having been accused of a crime and deported to a maximum security prison in El Salvador. (The US Supreme Court ruled Abrego Garcia’s deportation illegal; he was returned to the US on 6 June and is currently being held in a Tennessee prison.)

These high-profile cases are the tip of the iceberg, but they give some sense of ICE’s primary targets under Trump: non-citizens involved in protests against Israel’s war on Gaza and non-citizens who are Hispanic or Latino. ICE is also targeting immigrants of other ethnic backgrounds: the X account of the Department of Homeland Security shows photo after blurry photo of Filipino and Haitian as well as Mexican and Central American men being handcuffed by ICE agents, with captions accusing them of crimes such as rape and vehicular manslaughter. But because of the relative porousness of the border between the US and Mexico, it is Mexicans and people from its neighbouring countries who inflame the racist American imagination. These are the ‘bad hombres’ to whom Trump infamously referred in his 2016 debate with Hillary Clinton, the drug lords and gang members who must be eliminated from the law-abiding and presumptively white population.

In a remark that has since gone viral, Conor Simon, a resident of Honesdale, Pennsylvania, observed:

It’s really hard to fathom that the guy making my pizza for 25 years is a gangster and a terrorist, and the person who shows up in an unmarked car wearing a mask and body armour to take him away is somehow the good guy.